American 77

FAA clarification memo to 9/11 Independent Commission

May 22, 2003

Within minutes after the first aircraft hit the World Trade Center, the FAA immediately established several phone bridges that included FAA field facilities, the FAA Command Center, FAA headquarters, DOD, the Secret Service, and other government agencies. The US Air Force liaison to the FAA immediately joined the FAA headquarters phone bridge and established contact with NORAD on a separate line. The FAA shared real-time information on the phone bridges about the unfolding events, including information about loss of communication with aircraft, loss of transponder signals, unauthorized changes in course, and other actions being taken by all the flights of interest, including Flight 77. Other parties on the phone bridges, in turn, shared information about actions they were taking. NORAD logs indicate that the FAA made formal notification about American Flight 77 at 9:24 a.m., but information about the flight was conveyed continuously during the phone bridges before the formal notification.

Editor’s Note: Much has been written about the anomalies surrounding the lack of air defense on 9/11. Here are a few important updates.

Editor’s Note:
There has been so little journalistic attention to 9/11 truth that glaring factual contradictions in the “official narrative” can go unremarked in the media for months if not years. In the following letter, 911truth.org co-founder Kyle Hence urges Richard Clarke (former counter-terrorism ‘czar’ for both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Author, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror) to deal with the fundamental inconsistencies between his writing and testimony regarding 9/11 and the version released as gospel by the 9/11 Commission. Clarke has yet to respond but Kyle’s letter is an education in itself.

Open Letter to Richard A. Clarke
From: Kyle Hence
February 23, 2005

Subject: Pertaining to accounts in Clarke’s book Against All Enemies, neither retracted or refuted, regarding 9/11 war games and the participation of General Myers and Sec. Rumsfeld in a video conference managed from the White House Situation Room by Richard Clarke with the assistance of his Deputy, Roger Cressey.

Note of Explanation: This letter/email was presented (via email or in person) to Mr. Clarke on four occasions without a response of any kind to the specific questions raised regarding the actions (or lack of) from our military and top officials in positions of responsibility on 9/11. Given no response, and Rep. Cynthia McKinney’s attempt to raise the issue at February 16th Armed Services Committee hearing, CitizensWatch is taking the step of making this letter public.

This letter (see below) with questions pertaining to 9/11 (wargames, sworn testimony by Rumsfeld & Myers) was first sent as an email in June of 2004 to Mr. Clarke via his consulting company, Good Harbor. This note and these questions were presented personally to Mr. Clarke a second time on October 6, 2004 – and via email (3rd attempt) directly to his personal email box on October 15. When presented with a second opportunity in person (4th attempt) to respond to these queries backstage at a December 7th function at the Institute for Ethical Culture in New York City, Mr. Clarke refused to acknowledge the author and instead quickly left the room.

Receiving no response despite repeated attempts I am now releasing this to the public as an ‘open letter’ in the hopes responsible members of the press, family members and/or dedicated investigators will follow up publicly and personally with Mr. Clarke and the Commissioners who failed to examine the glaring discrepancies between Clarke’s accounts and those offered in public statements and in sworn testimony by Chairman Myers and Sec. Rumsfeld.

It should be noted that Richard Clarke is the only member of the Bush Administration to publicly apologize to the 9/11 families. While generating controversy at the time, his testimony before the 9/11 Commission regarding the warnings and plan for dealing with Al-Qaeda that he presented to Condi Rice and the Bush Administration in January of 2001 has been recently bolstered by the release of an unclassified version of his January memo to then National Security Advisor Rice.

This controversy could pale in comparison, however, to what could be revealed in sworn testimonies before the appropriate Committee regarding Sept. 11th war games (including “Vigilant Warrior” mentioned by Gen. Myers on the morning of Sept. 11th), changing NORAD timelines and the testimony already offered by Chairman Myers and Sec. Rumsfeld regarding their whereabouts and actions taken in the first and most critical minutes immediately following the attack on the World Trade Center. {see pages 1-7; Against All Enemies)

This is being made public now in an effort to force this issue into the public’s eye and ultimately to see full accountability and disclosure. Another 9/11 commemoration must not pass without these issues being addressed forthrightly and honestly before the American people; either in Manhattan before an AG Spitzer or DA Morganthau-convened Grand Jury or public hearings, in Albany before the appropriate Committee or on Capitol Hill. We offer this in hope that those with integrity in a position of responsibility will rise to this challenge. In this case above all others we must not allow the truth to continue to be veiled or obfuscated.

Re: Did a Boeing 757 crash into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001
An open letter to The Washington Post

After analyzing publicly available evidence over the past three years, I have come to the conclusion that it is very unlikely that a Boeing 757 crashed into the Pentagon on September 11. Photos and videos held by the U.S. government could very well refute my conclusion–I would welcome that because the alternative is far more disturbing. Indeed the five video frames from Pentagon cameras raise more questions than they answer–no Boeing 757 is visible, and the frames bear the wrong date (September 12) and time.

I am an engineering management consultant , and I live less than a mile from the Pentagon. The first question that I asked other onlookers as we viewed the crash site was: “Where’s the plane”?

In the photos publicly available, the hole in the Pentagon wall–prior to the collapse of the roof–appears too small to have been caused by a Boeing 757, and little or no airplane debris is visible on the Pentagon lawn. Indeed early reports claimed that a truck bomb had exploded, and that the damage was similar to that inflicted on the USS Cole in Yemen.

Editor’s Note:
An open letter to U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta regarding the omission of his 5/23/03 testimony to the 9/11 Commission from the Commission’s Final Report. That testimony included eye witness accounting of events that occurred in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) the morning of 9/11/01. Additionally, as of the time of this letter, it appears that an effort has been made to conceal Secretary Mineta’s testimony from the public by editing it from video archives of the 5/23/03 hearing on the 9/11 Commission website (the testimony is not deleted from the .pdf and .html archive).

Dear Secretary Mineta

On May 23, 2003 you testified before the 9/11 Commission in public hearing as to your experience on the morning of 9/11/01. During your testimony you stated that you arrived at the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) underneath the East Wing of the White House “at about 9:20 a.m.”, at which time Vice President Richard Cheney and other staff was already present in the center, with Mr. Cheney clearly in command. You also state in your testimony that you had believed based on a conversation that took place between Mr. Cheney and an unnamed “young man” that a shoot down order had been given by the Vice President prior to your arrival, because, in your words…

“There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, “The plane is 50 miles out. The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to, “The plane is 10 miles out, “the young man also said to the vice president, “Do the orders still stand?” And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, “Of course the orders still stand.

A citizens’ attempt to obtain several confiscated videos of the Pentagon attack has been denied, on the grounds that the footage may be used in persuading a jury to pass a death sentence on Zacaria Moussaoui. Is this believable? Will the court really release any of the videos to the public? …

August 2005. Scott Bingham of Washington DC sued the Justice Department earlier this year after it refused his Freedom of Information Act request to release suppressed video of the Pentagon attack. In a defense brief filed this month, the government says it must continue to withhold the videos because prosecutors may decide to use them in persuading a jury to pass the death sentence on Zacarias Moussaoui.

Few issues have raised as much controversy and acrimony among 9/11 researchers as their conflicting views on the Pentagon attack. While many argue honestly that a passenger plane never could have caused the damage there (see the Pentagon photo archive), others are just as certain that the idea prompted originally by “Hunt the Boeing” is a red herring that benefits the US government’s official story. It is also the only “9/11 conspiracy theory” that ever received a direct denial from the government (See “French Conspiracy Theorist Claims No Plane Hit the Pentagon,” State Department press release, June 2005)

Opinions are also split among the 911Truth.org stalwarts, and we all know many sincere people on either side of this divide. Our site’s consensus position until… Continue reading →

This latest article from Dr. Griffin follows up on his lecture, “Truth and Politics of 9/11: Omissions and Distortions of The 9/11 Commission Report”, in which he summarized the first half of his book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Ommissions and Distortions. He completes that summary here, with his thorough review of the second half, particularly, the inability of the US military to intercept anyof the hijacked planes on 9/11.

At the end of 2004, I published The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions1. Shortly before that book appeared, I delivered a lecture in which I set out to summarize its major points. (That lecture is now available in both print and DVD form.)2 Unfortunately, The 9/11 Commission Report itself3 contains so many omissions and distortions that I was able to summarize only the first half of my book in that lecture. The present lecture summarizes the second half of the book, which deals with the Commission’s explanation as to why the US military was unable to intercept any of the hijacked airplanes.

This explanation was provided in the first chapter of The 9/11 Commission Report. Although that chapter is only 45 pages long, the issues involved are so complex that my analysis of it required six chapters. One of the complexities is the fact that the 9/11 Commission’s account of why the military could not intercept the hijacked airliners is the third version of the official account… Continue reading →

The minute the Pentagon released images of the Sept. 11 attack on its building, the message boards at ABCNEWS.com lit up with conspiracy theories.

Some blame it on an inside job by members of the Bush administration to benefit their business interests. Some say it was planned by neoconservatives to advance their worldview. Others don’t know what happened but doubt the official story put forward by the government.

The world of conspiracy theories surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks is vast, and more than four years after the worst terrorist incident on U.S. soil, countless scenarios are put forth on the Internet, in academic forums and on talk radio each day. Some are of the “MIHOP” variety, which claim people in power made it happen on purpose, while others are of the “LIHOP” kind — they let it happen on purpose.

With Tuesday’s release of video footage of American Airlines Flight 77 crashing into the Pentagon building, an attack that killed 184 people on Sept. 11, questions rage again.

“It doesn’t clarify anything — I don’t see a plane in that image,” said Michael Berger, spokesman for 911Truth.org. “In fact, I thought that was underwhelming.”

Berger said 911Truth.org “would like to see various conspiracy theories laid to rest as well” and does not believe the government has addressed “inherent contradictions” in evidence and testimony surrounding the events of that day.

“We would like to know what happened,” he said. “Four-and-a-half years later, we still don’t have definitive proof that a plane… Continue reading →

This may be old news to you, but just a quick note here of something I’d missed about Flight 77, thanks to “Bismillah” and the RI forum, that I hope you won’t miss, too.

At least among those with a mind for such things, it’s fairly well-remembered that on September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld made the shocking announcement that the Pentagon “couldn’t track” $2.3 trillion of its transactions. “Iroquois” observes, “What’s interesting to me is that he made his press release on a Monday. In DC, I always see bad news given on a Friday, usually late in the afternoon on Friday. The exception, of course, would be when someone happens to know that there is a far bigger story coming out.”

And we know that Flight 77, allegedly piloted by an incompetent, made an aerobatic, spiralling descent over Washington, effecting a 270-degree turn to strike the Pentagon from a western approach at ground level. The side struck was the only one with an exterior wall hardened against attack, and was relatively empty while renovation continued.

Relatively. The unfortunate construction workers perished outside, but who were the expendables within?

When the 9/11 Commission was wrapped up, the Federal Aviatiation Agency (FAA) was blamed for failing to quickly relay information of the hijackings to the military.

Now, years later, the finger is being pointed at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad). As revealed in an article in the Washington Post (free subscription required):

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.

Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources.

***

“We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us,” said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. “It was just so far from the truth. . . . It’s one of those loose ends that never got tied.”

* * *

“I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described,” John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on Sept. 11, said in a recent interview. “The… Continue reading →

Conspiracy theorists insist the U.S. government, not terrorists, staged the devastating attacks

by Jonathan Curiel, Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle

Dylan Avery has a theory that he says casts doubts on Mark Bingham’s actions on Sept. 11, 2001. According to Avery, the San Francisco public relations executive never called his mom on a cell phone from the cabin of Flight 93, and never told her that “some of us here are going to try to do something.” Instead, says Avery, someone using a voice synthesizer — possibly a government official — called Alice Hoglan on the morning that Flight 93 — and Bingham — became part of Sept. 11 lore.

“The cell phone calls were fake — no ifs, ands or buts,” Avery says in “Loose Change,” a film he wrote and directed that’s one of the most-watched movies on the Internet, with 10 million viewers in the past year. “Until the government can prove beyond a shadow of doubt that al Qaeda was behind Sept. 11, the American people have every reason to believe otherwise.”

Avery is one of perhaps millions of Americans who believe the U.S. government — or rogue elements within it — either orchestrated the attacks or tacitly supported them for nefarious reasons.

As the five-year anniversary of the attacks approaches, the clamor of Avery and other conspiracy theorists has gotten stronger — and more widely accepted. According to a poll by Ohio University and Scripps Howard News Service, 36 percent of Americans believe that government officials “either assisted in the 9/ 11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East.” Twelve percent of Americans believe a cruise missile fired by the U.S.…

In late August 2001, when aggressive presidential action might have changed the course of U.S. history, CIA Director George Tenet made a special trip to Crawford, Texas, to get George W. Bush to focus on an imminent threat of a spectacular al-Qaeda attack only to have the conversation descend into meaningless small talk.

Alarmed CIA officials already had held an extraordinary meeting with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10 to lay out the accumulating evidence of an impending attack and had delivered on Aug. 6 a special “Presidential Daily Brief” to Bush entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”

“A few weeks after the Aug. 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the President stayed current on events,” Tenet wrote in his memoir, At the Center of the Storm. “This was my first visit to the ranch. I remember the President graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup and my trying to make small talk about the flora and the fauna, none of which were native to Queens,” where Tenet had grown up.

Tenet’s trip to Crawford — like the July 10 meeting with Rice and the Aug. 6 briefing paper for Bush — failed to shock the administration out of its lethargy nor elicit the emergency steps that the CIA and other counterterrorism specialists wanted.

While Tenet and Bush made small talk about “the flora and the fauna,” al-Qaeda operatives put the finishing touches on their plans.…

Congratulations on your recent appointment at Purdue University. As a long time citizen of the state of Indiana, I welcome you to what I know to be an outstanding institution of higher learning. At the same time, I hope to help you see an immediate opportunity to make a great positive difference in the lives of the people of our state and, in fact, a great difference in the lives of people everywhere. Through your appointment you have been given this opportunity to speak out and denounce what can be called, at best, criminally negligent science on the part of a small segment of the Purdue faculty.

Last month, a few Purdue professors, along with some students, presented a short animation ostensibly related to the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center (WTC). Surprisingly the University then announced this animation in a news release, as if it represented a scientifically accurate simulation of the impact of a Boeing 767 into the WTC’s north tower.[1] Unfortunately, this short video clip is far from a scientifically-based production, as it actually contradicts several of the government’s own, much more intensive studies, and shamefully fails to capture some of the most basic aspects of the related events. To make things worse, Purdue University paradoxically implies that this brief animation provides support for the overworked fire-induced collapse hypothesis. By simultaneously contradicting and voicing support for the official story, Purdue has helped to promote the Bush Administration’s fraudulent 9/11 Wars, and instantly… Continue reading →

Families of 14 of the people killed in the planes hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001, have settled their lawsuits, but relatives of other victims said yesterday that they would continue fighting in court to address their questions about how Islamic terrorists bypassed airport security, commandeered four jets and killed thousands of people.

One of those relatives, Mike Low, whose 28-year-old daughter, Sara, was a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to strike the World Trade Center, said he was not deterred by the settlements, which were filed Monday in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

“The frustrating thing is not having a trial date,” he said yesterday. “The wheels of justice turn excruciatingly slow. It doesn’t change my mind any. My desire and goal is to try to find some answers. I want to know why Abdulaziz Alomari and Mohamed Atta were allowed to walk on planes in Portland, Me., with prohibited weapons. I want somebody to tell me why that happened.”

The 14 settlements came a few days after the families won a ruling in Federal District Court in Manhattan that would have allowed a jury to hear a few minutes of a cockpit recording that captured the sounds of passengers trying to retake control of United Airlines Flight 93 before it crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.

Donald Migliori, a lawyer whose firm was involved in negotiating all of the settlements, said yesterday that Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein’s ruling on the recording last week had moved settlement talks forward.…

Early in 2007, Interlink Books published my Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory . The stimulus for my writing this book was the appearance in August 2006—just before the fifth anniversary of 9/11—of four publications intended to bolster the official account by debunking the alternative view, according to which 9/11 was an inside job. The most explicit and well-known of these publications was a book by Popular Mechanics entitled Debunking 9/11 Myths .

My book’s introduction and conclusion dealt with the irresponsible way the press, including the left-leaning press, has dealt with this issue. One of their failings, I showed, was simply to accept the official reports — especially The 9/11 Commission Report and the report on the World Trade Center put out by the National Institute for Science and Technology (NIST) — as neutral, scientific reports. They thereby ignored the fact that the 9/11 Commission was run by Philip Zelikow, who was virtually a member of the US. Bush administration, and that NIST is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce and hence of the Bush administration (which has distorted science for political purposes to an unprecedented extent).

The book’s four chapters then demonstrated that none of the documents of August 2006 actually served to debunk the claims of the 9/11 truth movement. The first two chapters dealt with two documents—including a new book by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton,… Continue reading →

“The Commission” by Philip Shenon has performed a great public service, letting the world know that there are good reasons to be suspicious of “The 9/11 Commission Report.” The main problem is the fact that the Commission was almost entirely under the control of Philip Zelikow, who was closely connected to the Bush White House. Although my book “Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11″ revealed some of the facts about Zelikow that showed him to be one of the worst possible choices for the Commission’s executive director, Shenon has revealed even more facts.

It was already known that Zelikow had been on the National Security Council (NSC) with Condoleezza Rice during the administration of the first President Bush; that he wrote a book with her while the Republicans were out of power; that he helped her make the transition from the Clinton to the Bush NSC; and that he wrote at her request the 2002 version of “National Security Strategy of the United States of America” (NSS 2002), which enunciated a new doctrine of preemptive war that was used, in Shenon’s words, to “justify a preemptive strike on Iraq.”

But now Shenon reveals more: that in applying to Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission, for the position of executive director, Zelikow failed to reveal some of his conflicts of interest, especially his authorship of NSS 2002 and his role on the transition team; that he continued, contrary to his promise,… Continue reading →

More material has been added covering the NSA’s surveillance of Ahmed al-Hada, father-in-law of alleged Pentagon hijacker Khalid Almihdhar. Both President Bush and Vice President Cheney used the non-exploitation of calls between his phone in Yemen and the hijackers in the US to justify the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program in January 2006. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell attributed the failure to trace the calls to a 1981 executive order earlier this year, and Mukasey bizarrely then claimed that one of the calls was between the US and Afghanistan, rather than Yemen. This confused the media somewhat, and a group of congressmen asked Mukasey for an explanation.

The following is a response from the U.S. Secret Service to a Freedom of Information Act request for the arrival time of U.S. vice president Richard Cheney at the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) on September 11, 2001, as well as the names of all those granted entry there that day.

Dear Requester:

Reference is made to your Freedom of InformationlPrivacy Acts requests originally received by the United States Secret Service on April 17, 2008, for information pertaining to the following:

File no. 20080330: copies of documentation pertaining to the names of persons admitted entry into the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) located within the White House on September 11, 2001 ;

File no. 20080331: copies of documentation which reveal the time on September 11, 2001, Vice President of the United States Richard Cheney entered the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) located within the White House.

A review of the Secret Service’s systems of records indicated that there are no records or documents pertaining to your requests in Secret Service files. Enclosed is a copy of your original request.

If you disagree with our determination, you have the right of administrative appeal within 35 days by writing to Freedom of Information Appeal, Deputy Director, U. S. Secret Service, Communications Center, 245 Murray Lane, SW, Building T-5, Washington, D.C. 20223. If you choose to file an administrative appeal, please explain the basis of your appeal and reference the case number listed above.